Adam Kinney, Continuum Explorer

Gadget Project Template for Visual Web Developer 2005

Adam Kinney — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 08:00:00 GMT

donavon, who has made some pretty cool gadgets, put together a project template for gadgets that works with Visual Web Developer Express.

This is awesome, we've been working on releasing a Starter Kit for gadgets which includes a very similiar template, and donavon's will work as a great tool until then. Visual Web Developer Express is a great choice for developing gadgets its free, has JavaScript colorizing and intellisense and it supports templates like the one just released.

Ok, donavon, I guess we can forgive you for the FireFox gadget now... :)

Live.com is hiring

Adam Kinney — Sat, 19 Nov 2005 01:49:00 GMT

Sanaz posted that the Live.com team is hiring. If you're into gadgets, Ajax and want to work with a progressive kick ass team, you should send in your resume. If I wasn't at my current job, I'd be sending mine in.

Add this blog to Live.com flair

Adam Kinney — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 19:34:00 GMT

We've recently updated Microsoft Gadgets, to enhance the Add gadget experience by using the a new funciton added to Live.com. You can now add a Gadget via the querystring, plus it has autodiscovery of feeds by searching for "application/rss+xml" links. Thinking the idea was pretty cool, I've added a flair button to my site:

Notice the simple link structure: http://www.live.com/?add=http://www.adamkinney.com

GotDotNet Birthday Party this Friday

Adam Kinney — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:21:00 GMT

GotDotNet is having a birthday party this Friday celebrating its fifth year. GotDotNet.com was where I spent a lot of time learning about .NET back in 2001. I was a Flash/ASP/VB6 guy at the time, and there was little .NET action going on, either that or I just didn't know where to find it. I learned a lot there, mostly by answering other people's questions after taking the time to figure them out. Erik Porter and I were actually given unofficial titles as "GotDotNet Gurus" by the GDN team (although unofficial it still made its way on my resume).

So yeah I'm going to the party this Friday, hope to see some familiar faces there, or at least those faces behind the names I know. Standard boilerplate invite to follow:

The Gotdotnet team is throwing a Birthday Party and all Gotdotnet users are invited! The party will occur at the Microsoft Visitor Center this Friday, November 18, 2005 between 6PM and 10PM. For more event details, see http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/archive/2005/11/14/492390.aspx or visit the Gotdotnet homepage.

Building a simple gadget for Live.com Article is up

Adam Kinney — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 22:53:00 GMT

One week and one day later from the new MicrosoftGadgets site going live and we've got 50+ gadgets already. Not too bad, especially since there's been little documentation so far. Actually I believe that's been part of the fun for those who have been wandering around in the new land.

We do have articles in the works, though, and things are moving fast. This first one recounts the story of my first simple gadget and illustrates the basic components needed to build your own gadget.

Building a simple gadget for Live.com

Expect more in the future on advanced uses of the Atlas Framework (which is powering the Live.com site) and demonstrations on new ways to use gadgets.

CommunityServer experience as a Job Requirement

Adam Kinney — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 01:22:00 GMT

I was just sitting here thinking about how familiar I have become with the CommunityServer code base due to the last update of MicrosoftGadgets.com. I spent a lot of time trying to build on top of CS codebase and not break into it if possible. The idea being, that when new CS versions are realeased the updates to our code base will be as simple as possible.

I wonder if someday, Community Server knowledge will be a requirement for a developer position. Its not needed to work on the Channel9 team today, but it would be very valuable.

Channel9 guy makes it on Engadget

Adam Kinney — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:14:00 GMT

Thanks to dahat, the 9 guy made it into the Engadget Halloween Costume Contest. Awesome, love seeing the 9 guy get to party.

dahat also walked away with a copy of VS2005 for his efforts, thanks to the Channel9 Halloween costume contest.

Source code for custom live.com gadgets

Adam Kinney — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 19:01:00 GMT

Since the launch of the MicrosoftGadgets site, I've been getting a lot of requests for the source code of the gadgets featured in our gallery. Most likely because at launch all gadgets were accredited to my account. Credits are being properly assigned as users sign on. but anyways, I'll show you how to find the source code.

The fun part about the live.com gadget platform is that its open in nature. Its all JavaScript, xml and css. So let's take a look at the Virtual Earth gadget. Once you have the manifest xml url (found today by the lame framed AddGadget page. This will be replaced with a single-click to live.com asap), you will see a list of component files. The first one listed is a link to the gadget's .js file. Open it up and there you have all of the code. Remember please respect any copyrights and the common courtesy of letting the creator know you dig their gadget so much you peeped at their code.

Microsoftgadgets.com goes live

Adam Kinney — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:22:00 GMT

Jeff mentioned it here, but last night we published the new and improved MicrosoftGadgets.com site to coincide with the announcements made by Microsoft today (good coverage on Memeorandum). A troubelsome deployment, but everything worked out in the end.

So we've got a new look and feel. The Gadget Gallery, a central location for sharing gadgets. Forums, a place for the community to get together and talk about Gadgets. And we announced the MicrosoftGadgets.com "Build a Gadget" contest where you can win an XBOX 360! (wish I was eligible...)

Under the covers, the site is still running CommunityServer at its core. My goal during development, was to lay our custom UI layer on top of the CS code as seamlessly as possible. The majority of the time, this was actually pretty simple to do by inheriting from the CS controls and overriding when needed. As far as custom data access goes (we do have a few custom objects in the sql db), this was done by leveraging the data provider model. In short, we wouldn't have been able to turn this site around so quickly and had such rich forum and blog functionality without Community Server. Definitely a great resource and I'm really looking forward to their next release.

All in all, I'm very excited about MicrosoftGadgets.com and looking forward to watching community grow.